Governor rejected the plan. Looks like courts will change those voting borders because state house and senate have too many wacko extremists. Only moderates can get something useful done.

Gerrymandering means moderates cannot get elected to a Congress. So courts must fix it. Expect wacko extremists talk show hosts to bad mouth the courts - since wacko extremists voters worship talk show hosts and hate moderates.

I realize now how hard it is for us nincompoops to figure out whether the map is fair. The GOP one looked more fair at first, but failed a lot of deeper analysis.

It's weird how this one does divvy up Delaware County's reds and blues.

Gov. Wolf brought in a Tufts U. Expert to say that it was fair. Apparently the map "showed no partisan skew when compared to more than a billion randomly generated maps."

(That actually sets off a skepticism alarm bell in my head, because I don't know whether "average" compared to "random" is what is needed. Certainly a *directed* computer-generated map could easily divvy up the state 50-50. Certainly a *random* computer-generated map will draw up a lot of 50-50s. How far off 50-50 does the map need to be, to be considered non-partisan? 52-48 may be statistically average, but it wins elections.)

The bad news: after the next census, a new map will almost certainly be required...

Gov. Wolf brought in a Tufts U. Expert to say that it was fair. Apparently the map "showed no partisan skew when compared to more than a billion randomly generated maps."

There have long been well proven mathematical statistics for defining what is fair verses what is partisan. Existing districting was measured by these numbers as massively partisan. All conversations about what is fair and what is not, without numbers, can only be subjective. Subjective means useless. A numerical specification must exist - and it has for a long time. But too many want to discuss this stuff using a subjective (also called emotional) perspective. Then the problem is never defined and nothing is solved.

What struck me was that the Tufts U Mathematician had advocated ways of preventing gerrymandering using math ... but this particular Monte Carlo method wasn't one of the ways she advocated (AFAIK, after a quick review).

Gov. Wolf brought in a Tufts U. Expert to say that it was fair. Apparently the map "showed no partisan skew when compared to more than a billion randomly generated maps."

So now the Times is saying that the math is in, and by this method of determining whether a map is fair, the new map isn't:

But maybe it's tricky and we don't understand it:

Quote:

The strong Democratic showing compared with Mr. Chen’s simulations doesn’t necessarily indicate that the map is a Democratic gerrymander. For one, the simulations aren’t perfect. And they aren’t necessarily representative of realistic partisan-blind maps. To take a concrete example: The simulations often split the city of Pittsburgh, something few human map-drawers would choose to do given the requirement to avoid unnecessarily splitting municipalities.
...
Over all, the new court-ordered map comes very close to achieving partisan symmetry in an evenly divided state.

The seeming contradiction between the analysis based on partisan symmetry and one based on simulated nonpartisan congressional districts gets at the heart of what may be the next big debate in gerrymandering: whether nonpartisan maps should strive for partisan symmetry, or whether they should try to avoid political considerations altogether.